My Google Latitude is now live to the world

People I know from London keep asking me, “Are you in San Francisco?” and, people from San Francisco keep asking if I’m in London.

The where-are-you question is very, very relevant in the context of business so I’ve been trying to solve that with the use of a Where Am I function on my personal site, Ewan.net.

I was previously using BlogLoc for this function… but it was getting a little bit annoying having to manually update every time I remembered.

So instead I’ve decided to try out Google’s Latitude facility. Latitude allows you to see the locations of your friends on a Google Map (either on your phone or online) and it works pretty well.

Recently the Google Latitude team announced that they’ve added a public ‘badge’ facility that you can place anywhere on the web to show off your current location. This definitely isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re a little bit suspicious or concerned about your privacy. But I like the concept myself and I thought it was worth a try. Google have been particularly direct with their warnings — which I heeded — so I haven’t displayed by actual street level GPS location. Instead I’ve displayed my general ‘city level’ location.

Here’s what it looks like on the blog:

Nifty.

If you’d like to do the same, get your Google Latitude Public Location Badge here.